An Edit-list is a lookup table containing rules ("Edit rules") about the commonly occurring words and phrases in a population of data.

During Key Building, Range Building and Matching, the components (words, codes and numbers) of a name or address are checked against entries in the Edit-List. If an exact string match is found the associated rule is invoked.

Edit-List rules are used to address commonly occurring variations and noise in name and address data. They are not used to address phonetic and orthographic error - this is handled by other components of the Population rule set.

Edit-List rules are used to address the following types of noise and variations: noise words, personal titles, company titles, nicknames, alternate forms of words, abbreviations, phrase replacements (e.g. acronyms), prefix and suffix variations, street types and more.

Each field type that can be used for building keys or search ranges has an Edit-List associated with it. In fact, each field type will have its own Edit-List. In most Standard Populations, this applies to the following three field types:

Person Names
Organization Names
Street Addresses

In addition, some fields that are not used for Key or Range building, but are used for Matching, also have Edit-Lists. Examples of these are:

ID numbers
Telephone Numbers
Postal Codes

These types of fields are called Efields. Efields benefit from Edit-Lists to overcome such problems as when an ID number that contains all 9’s should be considered a "null" number. Therefore, a rule would be required to treat all 9’s as a noise word.